What is space made out of? What is the blackness in space?
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In the traditional sense of *stuff*, space is made of nothing. Gas, dust, rocks, and all the rest of the matter in the universe is attracted to other matter because of gravity until it clumps together. There is like, *some* bits of gas and dust: maybe around 10^6 particles per cubic meter. For some context, a human body has somewhere around 10^27 particles, and a cubic meter of air has around 10^25 particles. So, think of the difference between how dense you are and how dense the air around you is: two orders of magnitude. Space is *twenty* orders of magnitude less dense.
You: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles
Meter^3 of air: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles
Interstellar space: 1,000,000 particles
That still looks like a big number, but it’s way less than even a single particle per cubic centimeter! That’s a whole lot of nothing.
However, quantum mechanics reveals that the entire universe is filled with quantum energy fields that have a little bit of energy. All particles are tiny packets of energy in a field, like a wave rising above the surface of water. Even where there is “nothing”, those fields are churning with energy like the surface of the ocean during a storm. Particles randomly pop into and out of existence, lasting for fractions of fractions of seconds. Those particles don’t exist long enough to do anything – and in fact, since they don’t interact with anything they arguably don’t “exist” at all. But the fields are there, throughout the universe.
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